An Internet security consultant installed malicious code on clients' and others' machines, and may now face up to 60 years in prison.
The story "'Botmaster' admits infecting 250,000 computers" published November 10, 2007 at 11:09 AM is no longer available on CNET News.
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Now take the most common use of botnets - that which earns lots of money to their operators: sending spam. How much damage does spam cause? You can "just hit delete"! How much does it cost to "just hit delete"? Approximately the time it takes an average person to see enough to positively decide this is junk, and then another half second to junk it. So let's say it's 3.6 seconds, just so we have a nice round numbers. So a 1000 spam messages take one working hour to clean up, and a spam run of 100,000,000 messages costs 100,000 working hours. Let's say you get someone to do it at minimum wage, which is $5.85 in the US right now (according to Wikipedia. It's higher in Europe, and most spam recipents' time is worth more than that). Then you get that the cost of just cleaning the junk of one spam run to less than all the mailboxes in just the USA is more than half a million dollars! Shouldn't this alone be enough to put the spammers in jail?
Spammers are thieves. They steal the media on which they post their advertisements, and the value of what they steal from all of us is millions of $$ each day. Law enforcement should find a way to get them and convict them for the damage they cause.
How to stop spam? Stop the companies paying people to spam. Like how to stop drugs? Stop the people making the money on the top.
The world could do without him and his ilk.
What he claims is probably a small fraction of what he actually did. If he'd on the other hand, trashed billions of dollars in Irak, he'd probably have the Medal of Freedom.
In any case, he's their kind of guy!
- This could end all spam
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by ramudd
November 15, 2007 12:55 PM PST
- Catch them and then a few public hangings like they do in Iraq might let them understand that we are getting really PO'd about this SPAM crap. At least it will stop each one hanged from becoming a repeat offender.
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